This section is intended to provide a background or context to the invention that is recited in the claims. The description herein may include concepts that could be pursued, but are not necessarily ones that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, what is described in this section is not prior art to the description and claims in this application and is not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Mobile IP is an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standard communications protocol that allows mobile device users to move from one network to another while maintaining their permanent IP address. Through Mobile IP, nodes may change their point-of-attachment to the Internet without changing their IP address. This allows the nodes to maintain transport and higher-layer connections while moving. Node mobility is realized without having to propagate host-specific routes throughout the Internet.
Power consumption is a major concern for mobile network nodes. If a mobile station maintains an active connection with a respective base transceiver station for an extended period of time, it will quickly drain its battery. For this reason, mobile stations typically will enter an “idle state” when it is not receiving or transmitting data.
When a mobile station switches to an idle state, it informs its serving base transceiver station that it will be reachable only at certain points of time. Therefore, if the base transceiver station later needs to awaken the mobile station due to incoming data, it has to wait for the next contact time to inform the mobile station that it needs to wake up in order to receive the data. However, before the mobile station reaches the active state and is ready to receive data packets, a large number of data packets may have accumulated waiting for transmission in the serving base transceiver station. Since a number of other mobile stations may be in a similar situation at any given moment, a relatively low capacity base transceiver station or other network element may be forced to discard data packets that are intended for the various mobile stations, resulting in undesirable packet loss. Furthermore, situations will inevitably arise where the mobile station, due to its mobile nature, becomes temporarily unreachable by the base transceiver station. In this situation, the packets buffered by the base transceiver station must be moved over to the new serving base transceiver station, doubly burdening the low bandwidth “last mile” data link of the base transceiver station.
It would therefore be desirable to provide a system and method by which a mobile station can effectively transition from an idle state to an active state without consistently suffering packet loss due to the reasons discussed above.